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Portrait of James Lee Burke Photo: Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images (1996)

Sample of authors

Burke, James Lee

James Lee Burke is an American author of Irish descent born in Houston, Texas, and brought up on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast. His father died in a road accident when James Lee Burke was eighteen years old. Burke enrolled at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, in 1955 and transferred to the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1957, where he read journalism and graduated with...

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Literary figures

Tom Ripley

Gender: Male

He is charming, handsome and cultivated as well as being a ruthless serial killer and psychopath totally lacking in empathy, the main character in five classic thrillers by Patricia Highsmith. Thomas ‘Tom’ Ripley became an orphan when he was five years old, and was brought up by a callous female relative. He later marries the wealthy Héloïse Plisson, but nevertheless has successfully continued his...

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